For older games, mods offer a brilliant source of creativity and inspiration as they reinvent adventures from beginning to end, so you barely recognize them. Terrarria, being over a decade old at this point, is thankfully home to a sea of crafty mod developers, breathing new life into the survival adventure. Since its 2011 debut, modders have delivered tons of additional content, adding useful utilities, new map mods, and even creations inspired by beloved classics.
The 10 best Terraria mods, from Hyrule to extra bosses
Below, we’ve outlined what we believe are the 10 best Terraria mods for adding hours upon hours to your next playthrough. They’re not all overhauls, but they will make you want to spend much more time in the game you love more than if you were just starting another vanilla playthrough. We’ve also included a bonus mod you didn’t know you needed but will thank us for including.
10. Arcania RPG Map
The Arcania RPG Map mod for Terraria is a wild new map and roleplaying experience built for the game. Not only are there mysterious new locations to explore that you won’t have encountered before, but you can craft a character as if you were playing a true fantasy RPG like Skyrim. With multiple races and professions to choose from, there’s a good amount of replayability in here too.
9. The Story of Red Cloud
If you love Terraria and Dark Souls, then you’ll adore The Story of Red Cloud mod. It’s a huge story built inside the game that takes heavy inspiration from The Legend of Zelda and Dark Souls titles. Boasting 17 dungeons and 15 to 30 hours of gameplay, this mod could take longer to complete than Terraria itself. It’s perfect for anyone looking for something totally different in a game they feel they know better than the back of their hand.
8. The Legend of Zelda- A Link to Terraria
Another massive overhaul mod for Terraria. The Legend of Zelda – A Link to Terraria is a brand new experience for up to four players to tackle in co-op. It takes you through 9 unique dungeons in a custom-created world that’s designed to make you feel like you’re playing a game very much linked to The Legend of Zelda franchise. If you’ve played the base game to death, this will reinvigorate that next playthrough.
7. Thorium
The Thorium mod for Terraria definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted. It adds a staggering 2,600+ items, 11 boss fights, new enemies, and even new classes to play around with. This mod is for those who have already played through a few of the others in this list and want something so unique that it may as well be a different game. Except it’s still Terraria.
6. Albion
Albion is a Terraria mod that’s designed to give new players an easier first time through the game. For long-time fans, it’s said to offer a sense of nostalgia. At its core, this mod is a set of signposts designed to help everyone know what they’re meant to be doing next without breaking their immersion and searching for a walkthrough or guide online. If you want to replay Terraria for the umpteenth time but don’t know how to make it feel different, this is a good mod to begin with.
5. TerraGuardians Mod
Terraria players who love companions and NPCs can expand that aspect of the base game using TerraGuardians Mod. It introduces a plethora of potential new companions to meet and recruit to live in your world. Up to 10 can be recruited, and what I love about finding them is that you need to get clues from the Dryad. This mod will just broaden the base game by adding a new layer of complexity but retain that core experience.
4. Terraria Overhaul
The Terraria Overhaul mod isn’t what you’d expect at first glance. Instead of focusing on reskinning the game and making it look completely different, it’s built to add more mechanics and systems for you to learn and adapt to. Some of the most interesting changes it makes include a streamlining of the movement system, the addition of more blood and gore, a gun overhaul, and unique seasons. It’s seasons that really change the game, with spring being the calmest, summer introducing dangerous heatwaves, fall boosting the powers of evil creatures, and winter trying to kill you at every given opportunity.
3. Calamity
If you’ve reached the endgame in Terraria more times than you care to count and want something to extend it further, Calamity is the mod of your dreams. In addition to new bosses and enemies, it brings more difficulty modes to get frustrated with. What I really love about Calamity is how a lot of its content is sprinkled among the main progression path in Terraria. It extends gameplay naturally before asking if you want a brutal experience to bash your head against.
2. The Undertale Mod
The Undertale Mod is a lost mod from one of the early iterations of tModLoader. This mod restores it for everyone to experience, allowing them to battle a new boss, Sans, in Terraria. While not as comprehensive as some of the other mods in this list, I love this one because it restores what could have been lost media and a part of the game’s modding scene past.
1. Enigma
The Enigma mod for Terraria introduces steampunk elements and a new way to level up. It’s interesting because a new item, the Soul Stone, is required to level up and progress. While it might not extend the gameplay that much, it changes things around enough so that players who think they’ve mastered the base game will find something new to intrigue them. There’s also a lot of new lore included in the mod that makes the world feel fresh yet very ancient and lived in.
Bonus: Overgrown Castle
The Overgrown Castle mod for Terraria doesn’t add anything massively special, but you’ll thank yourself for installing it all the same. It adds a huge, ancient castle that time has long forgotten, and you can explore it from the start of your next playthrough. It’s packed with chests to open and grab items from and can be found by going left from your very first spawn point. I love how Terraria‘s world-building is achieved through the areas you explore and the way caves, hills, and NPCs appear in different locations or after specific events. It makes the game’s world feel alive in a different way each time, and I think Overgrowan Castle adds to that.
How to download and install mods for Terraria
To download and install mods for Terraria, you first need to download tModLoader. This is a mod manager supported by Terraria‘s developer that’s going to make playing around with mods so much easier. With this installed, you can easily turn mods on and off and tweak the settings for each from within an understandable framework.
Of course, some mods, though not all, won’t work with tModLoader. For those, you’ll need to follow the specific instructions given in the mod’s instructional explainer. Usually, these mods will require you to download them and move the game files into a specific location within Terraria‘s files in your Steam Library.
